Near the end of his recent book, Conservatism: An Invitation to the Great Tradition (highly recommended), the English philosopher Roger Scruton makes a very interesting observation about what is possible in America but not in Europe. As he puts it, the burden of American conservatism has been to define the customs and traditions most in [...]
Liberal arts students are “generalists in a specialized world,” and as a result, they bring many analogies to bear on the problems that they will face on a daily basis in the world of work. And those analogies come from what they actually study, from Homer to field science to statistical analysis to metaphysics. Back [...]
It’s always important to remember that the Founders of our country did not predicate their arguments for independence on some idea of liberty as the release from all constraints of law or qualms of conscience, but on real, reasoned understandings of the duties that come with freedom and the gratitude that binds us to the [...]
A sentence from the first paragraph of Federalist 1 occurs to me on the oddest occasions: “But this is a thing more ardently to be wished than seriously to be expected.” In its original context, Alexander Hamilton, writing under a pseudonym, explains how unlikely it would be if everyone engaged in forming the new Constitution [...]
Big Brother needs to subordinate history—that is, what actually happened—to the political desire of the moment, so much so that we no longer even expect objective news; in fact, we doubt the very possibility of it. When George Orwell’s 1984 first appeared in print seventy years ago, no one could have predicted its enormous influence. It gave [...]
As this year’s seniors take their last exams and prepare to walk across the stage on Saturday morning, I’m led to think about the effect of this whole unique education at Wyoming Catholic College on them. How will it all come together—all the theology and philosophy, the literature and history, the Latin, music, and fine [...]
T.S. Eliot reaches into the unsaid, perhaps even into the ultimately unsayable, in a way that makes new possibilities present for those of his own time. Eliot comes out of the great tradition, the long conversation of the West, which is now your own earned inheritance as well. What will you do with it? Early [...]
The good mentor is virtually inseparable from the phenomenon of initiation that has always been understood as a crucial part of the rite of passage between one condition in life to another, a new and deeper community. In an age where mentors and rites of passage are being neglected, we should not forget the fundamental [...]
Several weeks ago, I wrote down some of my reservations about the fantasy works of C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, both of whom I praised. I anticipated at the time that my reservations would anger someone—but who knew that it would be my redoubtable friend Joseph Pearce, who has given such insightful attention to my [...]
This morning, I had the privilege of speaking to the entire student body and faculty of Portsmouth Abbey School on the eastern shore of Narragansett Bay, nine or ten miles north of Newport, Rhode Island. My topic was “why literature matters,” but my emphasis was on the way that identity politics ruins both literature and [...]
J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis tempt us to escape to a self-evidently numinous world rather than to seek out the texture of wonder in this one. What we need is an unsparing literary realism—literature without recourse to fantasy, literature in which talking trees do not come to the rescue. It’s quiet at Wyoming Catholic College [...]
What exactly is friendship? It’s a crucial question, one of the most important any of us will ever face—personally, politically, or theologically. But when do we ever, as adults, get a chance to think such a question through, especially in a context that allows friendship to blossom? In the ancient world, friendship was a high [...]
Lent is an extended occasion for us to re-examine characteristic and mostly unconscious feelings of “entitlement,” that buzzword of our day... Lent is once again upon us—and not a moment too soon. When Ash Wednesday comes, even mild fasting and abstinence wake us up and reveal all kinds of things we have taken for granted. [...]
“Forgetfulness of being”—perhaps we could also call it “forgetfulness of givenness”—underlies most of the problems that we face. To forget being means to forget how astonishing it is that anything exists at all... Today’s offering in our Timeless Essay series affords our readers the opportunity to join Glenn Arbery, as he ponders the wonder of [...]